We saw the hotels without available rooms. We saw the restaurants flooded with customers waiting for a seat. And we saw the lines at gas stations with customers waiting to fill their gas tanks.

The annual Battle of Selma — along with a number of other weekend events — attracted thousands of visitors to Selma and the increase in Selma’s population was obvious to those who drove around town over the weekend.

So, count us among the shocked when we heard comments from Selma city leaders that the Battle of Selma and the annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee have not been found to have a dramatic impact on the sales tax revenues.

Why not?

Most weekends in Selma, while often busy, don’t nearly have every hotel room booked or every restaurant filled or every gas station packed.

Why don’t these huge tourism weekends show up huge on the city’s ledger? Where is the money going?

For more than a year, Selma Mayor George Evans has talked about the declining sales tax figures from one year to the next. Each time, there is a searching by Evans for an answer to undestand the decline. We would join in him in that wondering.

The annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee brings thousands of people to Selma each and every year, but many of those events do not generate sales tax in themselves. The vendors who reap the rewards of huge crowds do not buy a business license nor do they pay city or county sales taxes.

The Battle of Selma shares a similar story.

It is often claimed that a dollar spent in a city by a visitor turns over in the economy seven times.

If the argument by city officials that these events don’t show to have a significant impact, just imagine what would happen if they didn’t happen? We’re sure the negative impact of not having the event in the first place surely would be felt.

The state projects that tourism has a $66 million impact on Selma and Dallas County. Just imagine if these two events, or the many others, simply didn’t happen.

As we welcome thousands of more visitors to our city this week with the Alabama High School Athletic Association, let us remember the impact these visitors have on our businesses — all of them — and then think about if these visitors ever stopped coming.